Who is behind it?

OpenCensus originates from Google, where a set of libraries called Census are used to automatically capture traces and metrics from services. Since going open source, the project is now composed of a group of cloud providers, application performance management vendors, and open source contributors. The project is hosted on GitHub and all work occurs there.

What data can OpenCensus collect?

Metrics are any quantifiable piece of data that you would like to track, such as latency in a service or database, request content length, or number of open file descriptors. Viewing graphs of your metrics can help you understand and gauge the performance and overall quality of your application and set of services.

Traces show you how a request propagates throughout your application or set of services. Viewing graphs of your traces can help you understand the bottlenecks in your architecture by visualizing how data flows between all of your services.

Other types of telemetry will be added to OpenCensus as the project matures. Logs will likely be added next.